Reciprocal effects of visual and auditory stimuli in a spatial compatibility situation

Abstract

When events occur in the visual and auditory modalities simultaneously, normal humans often give preference to the visually presented information. In the present experiment the existence of such a visual predominance was tested in a spatial compatibility paradigm. The results showed that reaction times were significantly delayed when the position of the visual stimulus did not coincide with the position of the auditory stimulus, whether subjects attended to the visual or to the auditory stimuli. Thus, no visual predominance was demonstrated. The discrepancy between these results and those of studies showing visual predominance can be explained by differences in the direction of attention: visual predominance appears when attention is divided between visual and auditory modalities, but seems to be absent (as in the present experiment) when subjects are asked to attend to one modality while ignoring the other. © 1988, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.